Tag Archives: user testing

When it comes to ecommerce, the minor details relate to major consequences. The whole existence of these sites relies on their customers, their visitors. Ensuring these visitors not only convert, but continually return to convert is key to their business. Conversion rates are the key metric through which an ecommerce site can gauge their success. Maintaining these are as high as possible are key to happy customer and a happy company. Affected by all manner of adjustments to layout, process and speed; it is essential to find which of these issues are holding back the website, and fix them pronto.Read the rest of this entry »

Have you been wondering what type of user testing technique works best for you? Well, you are not the only one. And thank goodness for Linkedin, I had the great opportunity to get in touch with a few UX influencers to get a sense of their favorite user testing methods. I asked them what type of user testing method they found most efficient. The discussion did not only yield some intriguing results, but offered a pretty diverse list. I found it in great interest to present the discussion to you to get a sense of what user testing methods would be the best fit for your next project.Read the rest of this entry »

The most popular way of optimizing a website is by A/B testing it. For some reason the bigger the website gets, the harder it becomes to test. If you are dealing with optimization in a big company there is a fair chance you will recognize this. Putting up with rules and regulations, trying to get everyone involved and not getting people to agree upon what to test are just a few of the many things you will run into. The easiest way to solve this is to avoid working for big companies and only work for startups. However if you change your approach to testing, you might be able to create some magic, even in a big company.Read the rest of this entry »

There have been plenty of discussions lately about usability. Still I notice that people get the usability confused with the actual look and feel of a website. A good website requires a lot from us as designers: Clean coding to make sure everything works and everything works fast; great usability to meet all expectations people have when visiting our site; and at the same time an exceptional user experience to differentiate us from competitors and to help us build a relationship with our users. Where do we start to design a website that meets all these requirements?

Why is it people are so keen to embrace user testing but reject other user experience design techniques? I have asked myself this question on many occasions. Especially given that the full potential of user testing can only be exploited within a wider UX strategy.

My first thoughts were that it is because user testing can be performed without making any change to the project lifecycle. It can be completed independently without affecting the project plan. In his book The inmates are running the asylumAlan Cooper makes a similar statement. He says: “The main reason why empirical user testing has been widely accepted in the high-tech business is that it fits easily into the existing sequence”.

User testing. Everyone knows it, everyone does it, or at least knows he should be doing it when creating user interfaces. Over time many different kinds of user testing, such as classic in-lab user testing, remote, or automated user testing, have evolved. They are all based on the same idea: user centred design. And they all have their advantages and their disadvantages. Let’s look into different approaches to user centred design and how the saying ‘many a little makes a mickle’ applies to automated remote user testing.

Do subjects like human behavior, mental models and cognitive science give you a kick? It does so to us at Usabilla, so we try to share some of the exciting stories we read in posts about Piaget’s theory or the Vampire Effect. Today we’d like to write about the decoy effect, an effect we saw described for the first time in one of our favourite books Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions, written by Dan Ariely. The effect can shortly be described as follows:

The recent redesign of TechCrunch caused a lot of noise among readers of the startup blog. Most of the critiques are similar to Youtube comments: almost all are unfounded, most contain a lot of grammatical errors; and some are blatant personal attacks. TechCrunch even provided a hatemail template to cater to users who seem to feel like “they’d woken up to discover that someone had crept in and rearranged the features of their wife’s face”.